The Record, the Double, and the Singular

EVENT DESCRIPTION

WOAW Gallery is thrilled to announce the grand opening of its new location situated in the vibrant neighbourhood of Sun Street, Wan Chai, Hong Kong on August 22, 2023. Building upon its unwavering dedication to showcasing cutting-edge contemporary art and enriching the local art scene, this expansion follows the resounding success of our original space on Sun Street in Wan Chai and now includes an additional street-level gallery in close proximity, expertly overseen by the acclaimed Beau Architects. To mark the inauguration of this new location, WOAW Gallery will be presenting a special twofold exhibition by Korean artist Taedong Lee and local artist Kitty Ng, with one in the new space, 3 Sun Street Wan Chai, and the other in its first space in the same street. The vivacious dialogue between the two exhibition represents the gallery as a bridge, connecting disparate artistic communities worldwide.

From August 22 – October 22, 2023 at 3 & 5 Sun Street Wan Chai, a duo-solo exhibition of works by Kitty Ng and Taedong Lee, titled “The Record, the Double, and the Singular,” initiates a dialogue between two contemporary artists who start their paintings with their personal archive of photographs. In the first half of Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes argues that photography is a medium of death; when the camera captures a moment, it records the passing of that very moment. Ng and Lee, however, view photographs as catalysts for the singularity inherent to the processes of recollection and distortion.

By indulging in images from their archive, they allow for a certain fantasy to take hold of them — a fantasy from the present, that deepens and changes the original memory associated with the photograph. By giving in to the centrifugal force of speculation, their memories become muddled with their lives today. They reduce, add, revise, and ultimately transform the image, etching onto the canvas the irreducibility of their singular response.

Spatial and temporal speculation lies at the heart of Tae Dong Lee’s practice. From the comfort of his studio, Lee traverses his family photographs and uproots them of their context, concurrently opening up the image and his practice to conjecture. The distortions of his memory that take place through this process combine the vitality found in the vivd landscapes of Jeju Island with his interiority. The figures found in the photographs — himself, his parents, and his siblings — take new shape and form against a renewed terrain.

In “An Exceptionally Bright Night” (2022), three figures — the artist and his parents — sit atop horses, eddying in the lush blue-green pigments that make the environment. Echoing the mysticism of Peter Doig, the work absents spatial markers and engenders what the artist calls a “phantom place.” In “Escaping” (2022) and “Escaped” (2022), two images that share the same source image, we are offered an insight into the ebbs and flows of the artist’s interiority. Utilising darker hues, the former offers an elegiac lament while the latter indulges in a reluctant jubilance.

It is imperative for Kitty Ng that her photographs reinvent themselves through her paintings. Taken over the course of her college years, her imagery is composed of friendships and kinships rooted in a quotidian intimacy. Her subjects can be seen in a dorm room, the streets of Shanghai, in the comfort of a home, in a dorm room, or even on something as mundane as a walk. As rings true with most beautiful banalities, each stroke on the canvas is placed with yearning, a yearning to reconcile the fallibility of relationships — that they change, dissolve, and take new forms.

Ng’s studio practice began with making collages in Photoshop; in works such as “Forward We Go!” and “S to S,” she supplants intimate memories with friends and family and combines them with jovial moments. The resulting compositions are playful, charming, and full of a lived life. During her residency in Shanghai, she started moving away from college but retained the figurative impulses she developed through them. In the series of works titled “Love Languages” and “Bittersweet Fantasy,” she embraces the selective nature of memory, leaving behind few details and white space to surround it.

Ng and Lee firmly reject ideas of nostalgia that have become the ascendant trend in figurative works. They reject the stability the personal archive might suggest. They reject, and they reject. Their voices converge in the act of failing to double the memory. Our minds are always in flux, we are affected by the troubles of the every day, the whims of the heart, and the travails of existing. Unlike mechanical processes, our bodies cannot reproduce exactitudes. They can barely do approximations. It is this singularity that distinguishes us. We fail, fail, and we fall. And therein lies something gorgeous.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Taedong Lee (b. 1989, Seoul, South Korea) obtained his MA Fine Art: Painting from Camberwell College of Arts, London in 2020 and his BA in Painting Fine Arts from Gachon University College of Arts, Korea in 2016. Lee’s solo and group exhibitions includes: Cuturi gallery, Singapore (2022) Another Beginning, Brown hands, Gumi, South Korea (2023), Landscape, Taymour grahne projects satellite, London (2022), Spiral life, Suchang Youth Mansion, Daegu, South Korea (2021) and London Grads Show, Saatchi Gallery, London (2020).

Taedong Lee works with motifs of memory and feelings related to the landscape, which was either visited, seen in a picture, or read in a book. By distorting the image through combination of impasto and thin layers of paint, Lee transforms classical scenes of nature into nostalgic compositions, where forests, rivers and sky begin to blend into a single, impressionistic whole.

Kitty Ng is a painter born and raised in Hong Kong. Currently, her practice is an exploration into the unfinished painting through a contemporary interpretation of the traditional Chinese technique, liu bai (留白), which directly translates to leaving white. She aims to unearth a new language that allows her to fully express her feelings tied with tender memories. Seeking inspiration from images of herself with loved ones, her work mainly focuses on human interaction, relationships with self and loved ones, and cultural identity.

She is a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Painting. Her solo exhibitions include If We Were Together at Yard Gallery in Shanghai, China (2021) and To Build a Playground of Intimacy at Unitled Space in Shanghai, China (2021). She is currently based in Hong Kong.